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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#271

Post by Pyxl101 »

eugeneionesco wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

How are you planning on combating cheating? For sure people will post solutions online to your CTFs.

This is an important problem. As part of interviewing processes, I have several times tried offering "take home work challenges". I had to stop after, having run the experiment several times, I detected plagiarism in about 30-40% of the cases. The risk is of plagiarism is real for any problem that's well known enough that the problem and solution can appear online, and detecting plagiarism is not always easy.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#272

Post by Sukotto »

rakoo wrote: post #136
tptacek wrote: post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

Thank you for running a long-term CTF ! I've always been interested in those "improve your coding skills by playing" challenges but from my inexistent experience most of them fall in a combination of: - They are timeboxed - They are mostly (if not only) about cracking security - They are targeted towards low-level languages You've already stated that it won't be timeboxed (which totally makes sense as a hiring "middl…

If you haven't seen it before, check out https://projecteuler.net/ which is a series of (very) loosely connected programming challenges.

The challenges start mostly bite-sized and typical programming problems (think fizzbuzz or "what is the 100th prime") and grow into some really interesting areas. You use whatever language(s) you wish, with no time limit, and are free to skip around to whichever questions interest you (or just do them in order... whatever you like)

I find it fun. You might too.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#273

Post by elliotec »

tptacek wrote: post #233
elliotec wrote: post #230

>Unfortunately, the technology industry is fundamentally unserious as to how it presently identifies and employs engineers. Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding ancient algorithms and useless trick questions with a capture the flag game!! That'll make the industry seem less "unserious." This is so unfathomably ridiculous. I can't believe you're marketing this as an interview replacement. If I get asked what my "Starfigh…

Nobody is going to ask you what your "Starfighter score" is. Without opening up a pointless vein of second-guessing about Patrick's writing: I think the timing of this post has led people to believe that this right here is my answer to The Hiring Post. No. The Hiring Post itself contains what I believe the answers to The Hiring Post are. There are two halves of the recruiting problem: OUTREACH and QUALIFICATION. Comp…

Thanks for your well thought reply to my regrettably snarky comment. I agree with you on many points, particularly how companies need to be smarter about qualification.

But yes, this post does seem to directly correlate, in timing and in content, to Patrick's Hiring Post. I'm surprised to see you say this is not your response to that, especially considering that it addresses many of the questions we should ask ourselves as outlined in The Hiring Post (namely consistency, data, and the idea of one being a “natural”).

Also the post itself is linked in the statement:

>We’re not here to fix the technical interview: we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place.

I disagree with the fact that outreach is a problem in recruiting. There is an entire industry of companies and teams created for the very purpose of reaching out to software developers for their skills. How many of us reading this thread get multiple recruiter emails a week?

Are the recruiters effective? Maybe or maybe not, but I (who am apparently one of seemingly only few) just don't feel that a competitive game needs to add itself as another middleman in the realm of software recruiting with the intent of "destroying the technical interview."

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#275

Post by timv »

patio11 wrote: post #51
jameshart wrote: post #32

One of the conventional complaints against CS-algorithm-heavy interviewing is that companies ask all these tough questions about distributed cache latency in red-black tree optimizations, then once they hire people, they're just bashing out PHP and MySQL. How do you make sure that the companies hiring your services have challenges that live up to the skills you're selecting for?

I've got nothing against CRUD apps, because they make the world go round, but it is unlikely that Starfighter will choose to send our candidates to firms making CRUD apps. The difference will be fairly obvious when you see our client roster. We're geeks with good taste for the kind of jobs a geek would actually want to have. (Sorry for being coy here. Don't want to jinx contract signing.)

I assume, given your involvement, that this isn't likely to be an issue, but how likely is it that your candidates will be able to find jobs outside of SF/NY, or in fact outside the US?

If the goal is to find the top talent that wouldn't don't normally show up on a firm's hiring radar, then I would expect that includes finding people who aren't in those cities (and don't want to be).

I couldn't find any mention of geography it in your blog post or on the starfighters.io website, but I've been burned many times by initiatives where the absence of geogrphical information is supposed to imply "USA only" (because they forget that the rest of the world exists), or if you're very lucky "USA and select European countries".

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#276

Post by graeme »

rfrey wrote: post #264
lambda wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your "About Us" page, you say "We're especially interested in talking to you if you will be hiring 10+ engineers in the next year, as we may be able to help you out with that. Get in touch with any of us." Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you? I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success;…

I obviously can't speak for the founders, but I suspect that if you're viewing this as a replacement for a technical phone screen, you might not be viewing it as intended. Did you read Thomas' "The Hiring Post" which was at the top of HN a couple days ago?

The hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159557

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#277

Post by [deleted] »

sfink wrote: post #237

Hey job seekers. I'm level 45 in starfighter with a power VI blaster in C++ and IX in Python. $100 to get you to level 30, x1.5 per level above that (though obviously I can't get you above 45, but I know a guy so I can subcontract up to 52.) You just have to set up a port forward from your machine and I'll take care of the rest. Contact info is in my profile. Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper i…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#278

Post by cdr »

Sukotto wrote: post #272
rakoo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for running a long-term CTF ! I've always been interested in those "improve your coding skills by playing" challenges but from my inexistent experience most of them fall in a combination of: - They are timeboxed - They are mostly (if not only) about cracking security - They are targeted towards low-level languages You've already stated that it won't be timeboxed (which totally makes sense as a hiring "middl…

If you haven't seen it before, check out https://projecteuler.net/ which is a series of (very) loosely connected programming challenges. The challenges start mostly bite-sized and typical programming problems (think fizzbuzz or "what is the 100th prime") and grow into some really interesting areas. You use whatever language(s) you wish, with no time limit, and are free to skip around to whichever questions interest y…

Euler is more like math problems that can be solved with programming than programming challenges. Very neat, but decreasingly useful for programming practice past the first 20ish.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#279

Post by yummyfajitas »

tptacek wrote: post #252
pron wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this might indeed help employers find better employees, I am concerned about hidden (or not so hidden) bias. Games like this (and the way this one is described confirms it) select for competitive people. Other talented programmers might prefer expressing their creativity and talent in less competitive ways. While competitiveness might be a desirable quality, sometimes it is not. It might also appeal to men more…

Best answer I can give was that we've heard that concern from a bunch of different sources, we share it, and we're designing against it to some extent. As a reminder: this is an outreach strategy we deployed at Matasano to enormous success. We had an English professor finish the crypto challenges. We didn't solve all our diversity problems, but we made a palpable dent in them, and we did that by coming up with someth…

Somewhat relatedly, as a person who's discussed these issues with you in the past, it sounds like you'll be gathering new evidence. How will your beliefs change?

For example, suppose $GROUP is over/underrepresented among top starfighter performers. What will be your new belief about $GROUP's technical talent and the causes of over/underrepresentation in tech in general?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#280

Post by olivercreashe »

I like this idea, but I also like the one proposed here http://ortask.com/a-better-way-to-hire-developers-and-tester...

I fear that starfighter will overlook goood candidates simply because they are not good at gaming, which makes the second approach by ortask more interesting and maybe balanced.

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